Part 7 (2/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: His Man-Servants _and_ his Maid Servants.
”JOVE _fixed it certain That whatever day Makes a man slave, Takes half his worth away_”]
A New England farmhouse and a Southern plantation:--What a contrast the two presented in colonial days! In the homes of Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut, the notable housewife was up before light, breaking the ice over the water, of a winter morning, preparing with her own hands the savory sausages and buckwheat cakes for the men's breakfast, and setting the house in order. To her it fell to take charge of the wool from the back of the sheep till it reached the back of her boy; carding, spinning, weaving, dyeing the wool, cutting the cloth, and sewing the seams, scouring floors and was.h.i.+ng dishes; all these duties fell to the share of the Puritan Priscillas. Yet, when evening fell, when the dishes were shelved on the dresser, these busy housewives, in their sanded kitchens, with the firelight reflected from their s.h.i.+ning tins, were not to be pitied, even in comparison with their more luxuriously attended sisters in Maryland or Virginia.
Life at the South was at once grander and shabbier, than in New England.
The Southerner's ease-loving nature had the power to ignore detail; and it is attention to detail which brings well-being to the household and wrinkles to the housekeeper. A thousand slaves could not take the place of one woman of ”faculty.” In fact, the more s.h.i.+ftless, lazy negroes there were, the less order and tidiness prevailed. But order and tidiness were not indispensable to happiness there and then, and the sum of human enjoyment was large on those old plantations, in spite of s.h.i.+ftlessness and slavery. Of that restless ambition which corrodes modern life, men had little, women had none, and servants less than none. The negro was a true child of the tropics, and with food and suns.h.i.+ne enough, was merry as the day is long.
A healthy negro, on a prosperous estate, under the charge of a gentleman, not under the bane of an overseer, came perhaps as near to animal cheerfulness as mortal often does. The master enjoyed that serenity and leisure which freedom from manual labor gives; his children grew up, each with a personal retainer attached to himself with the old feudal loyalty; the lady of the house was again the old Saxon _hlaefdige_, who gave out the bread to the tribe of servants day by day. Yet with all the brightness which can be thrown into the picture, slavery was a curse alike to slave and slave-owner, on account both of what it brought and what it took away.
It is strange to note how silently and unperceived the black cloud of slavery stole over the Colonial Cavalier. A casual entry in John Rolfe's journal records: ”About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold vs twenty Negars.” Before the arrival of this fatal vessel life-servitude was unknown. The system of apprentices.h.i.+p, and what would now be called contract labor, prevailed. These indented white servants were either transported convicts, sold for a season to the planters, or, like the Maryland _redemptioners_, poor immigrants, who contracted to serve for a period of time equivalent to the cost of their pa.s.sage, which was prepaid to the master of the s.h.i.+p on which they came.
The work of these indented servants was not excessive. ”Five dayes and a halfe in the summer,” said one who knew the situation from experience, ”is the allotted time that they worke and, for two months, when the sun predominates in the highest pitch of his heat, they claim an antient and customary Priviledge, to repose themselves three hours in the day, within the house. In Winter they do little but hunt and build fires.”
The Sot-Weed Factor gives a much less rose-colored account of the life of a redemptioner. A woman-servant in the poem, looking back on her life in England, exclaims:
”Not then a slave for twice two year, My cloathes were fas.h.i.+onably new, Nor were my s.h.i.+fts of linnen blue.
But things are changed: Now at the Hoe I daily work and Barefoot go, In weeding corn, or feeding Swine I spend my melancholy time.”
A ”melancholy time” many of the redemptioners must have had in their enforced service; but if the master proved too severe, the indented servant had the privilege of selecting another, and the original employer was indemnified for his loss. Susan Frizell, who had run away from her master, was recaptured and brought before the court for punishment; but her accounts of ill-usage so moved the authorities, that they remitted the extra term of service to which running away had made her liable, and only demanded that she should earn under a new master the five hundred pounds of tobacco to be paid to her old employer. The bystanders were so touched by poor Susan's pitiful situation that they collected six hundred pounds on the spot, and sent Susan on her way rejoicing, with a capital of one hundred pounds of tobacco to give her a new start in the world.
The law provided that the servant, when his time of service expired, should receive a portion of goods sufficient to make him an independent freeman, who might rise to be a councillor or an a.s.semblyman. A Colonial statute directs that ”at the end of said terme of service, the master or mistress of such servant shall give unto such man or maid-servant, 3 barrels, a hilling hoe and a felling axe; and to a man-servant, one new cloth suite, one new s.h.i.+rte, 1 new paire shoes, and a new Monmouth capp; and to a maid-servant, 1 new pettycoat and waistcoat, 1 new smock, 1 pair new shoes, 1 pair new stockings and the cloaths formerly belonging to the servant.”
The advantage of this system of indented service lay in its gradual absorption of the immigrant population, who thus had time to understand the laws and inst.i.tutions of their new country before they became in their turn citizens and lawmakers. The disadvantage lay in the encouragement it gave to kidnapping. Many children and young people in the seaboard towns of England were beguiled, or carried by force, on s.h.i.+pboard, to be sold as servants in the colonies. The kidnappers, or ”spirits,” as they were commonly called, served as bugaboos in many an English nursery to frighten naughty children into obedience under threat of being spirited away to America.
Howells' ”State-Trials” contains a pitiful account of the experiences of a young n.o.bleman sold as a white servant in Virginia through the plot of his covetous uncle, who wanted his property. The nephew is a mere child when he begins his apprentices.h.i.+p in the provinces, but, by a series of attempts to escape, he prolongs his term of service till, when he finally succeeds in getting back to England to claim his own from the treacherous uncle, he is a man grown, and as difficult of recognition as the Tichborne claimant. The great majority of the first indented servants sent over, however, were convicts ripe for the jail or the gallows, and only respited to be transported to the colonies, which long suffered from the introduction of such a cla.s.s of citizens.
The records of Middles.e.x County, England, tell their own story:
_3 April, 15 James I._
Stephen Rogers, for killing George Watkins against the form of Statute of the first year of King James, convicted of manslaughter, was sentenced to be hung, but at the instance of Sir Thomas Smith, Kn't, was reprieved in the interest of Virginia, because he was a carpenter.
_6 August, 16 James I._
On his conviction of incorrigible vagabondage Ralph Rookes was reprieved at Sheriff Johnson's order so that he should be sent to Virginia.
_28 April, 18 James I._
On her conviction by a Jury of stealing divers goods of Mary Payne, Elizabeth Handsley was reprieved for Virginia.
_31 st May, 18 James I._
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